A message from the future 🛸
Change comes “gradually, then suddenly.”
Climate Solutions // I S S U E # 6 5 // S T O R I E S
Hothouse is original climate journalism with a way to act. As a climate solutions newsletter, we dig into the evidence, figure out what works, and deliver the news to your inbox. This issue is the second and final installment in a series on climate change and the stories we tell ourselves. You may find the first issue here.
What electric dynamos can teach us
By Mike Coren
There’s this old story about electric motors I love. When America was industrializing, water powered most of its machines: thousands of mills, spinning jennies, and cotton gins. This dictated a very specific design. Factory floors were not the vast cavernous spaces we know today. They were vertical. To transfer power from a water wheel to the machines, engineers strung intricate webs of belts and pulleys and shafts within a building, known as the “group drive.” This allowed a single power source—the waterwheel—to power machines on every floor churning out the cheap goods for the emerging economy.
Steam engines, eventually, replaced water wheels. Then came the electric dynamo. Electric motors changed everything—but not at first. Once power was no longer constrained by flowing water, factories could be built almost anywhere in nearly any configuration. Early observers saw the potential.
In Paris, an American historian named Henry Adams walked the floor of the 1900 Paris Exposition. Strolling through the Galerie des Machines, he watched for hours, astonished, as immense German dynamos ran “noiselessly and smoothly as planets [while] asking them—with infinite courtesy—where the Hell they are going. They are marvelous. The Gods are not in it. Chiefly the Germans...[But] it is a new century, and what we used to call electricity is its God.”
Handed this miraculous technology, what did humanity do with it?
Well, first, we replicated the design of the old waterwheel mills. Most factories installed a giant electric motor on the lower floor connected to a maze of belts and gears. This inefficient design lasted until the 1920s. It wasn’t until 40 years after the arrival of London’s first power plants that small electric motors were routinely installed in individual machines, multiplying factories’ productivity. The first steam engines followed the same pattern. To take advantage of the old infrastructure, steam engines were employed to dump water on the water wheels, rather than power mills directly.
An important factor was at work: Reimagining the future is hard when the past lives all around you. Before change can happen, envisioning a new world is necessary. Stumbling toward this new reality is a messy process warns one historian: “An uncertain, quite protracted, and historically contingent” one, often stretching for 40 to 50 years.
But there’s reason to be optimistic. When change arrives, it is often not incremental. Take electric motors. After decades of slow adoption, they swept into new factories in a matter of years. In our technology-driven world, as one of Ernest Hemingway’s characters once spoke of bankruptcy, change comes “gradually, then suddenly.”
The same rules apply to a zero-carbon world. This alternative reality world is hard to imagine. What will our lives be like after emissions? Imagining it is one of the first steps to making it real. Accepting it—as we have done with electric cars, for example—grants permission to powerful actors from governments to CEOs to hasten its arrival, the last step before closing one chapter, and opening another.
So in this issue, Hothouse is writing down a few futures to help imagine the next chapter—and maybe even make it real. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote about the origins of the Green New Deal, “the first big step was just closing our eyes and imagining it.”
Here’s how Hothouse imagines the next few decades, looking back from the year 2050.
Cooking without gas
First, we cooked over wood, then coal. By the 20th century, most industrialized nations had switched to gas. But millions of people were still dying each year from indoor air pollution. By 2021, the first major cities began phasing out natural gas. At a time when 66 million homes (pdf) still burned methane indoors, New York City became the largest US city to ban gas hookups in new buildings. Then California’s new building codes demanded “electric-ready” buildings by 2023. It wasn’t long before the “cooking with gas” slogan, an industry jingle from the 1930s, ran out of steam: most major cities had banned it by the 2040s. At that point—as with lead in gasoline, officially phased out in 1996—the public had moved on. Most homes had thrown away their carbon monoxide alarms and switched to electrons long before as clear, fast, and efficient induction burners supplanted the blue flame.
Clearing the air
In the 20th century, you could pluck any leaf anywhere in the world, place it under a scanning electron microscope, and see, magnified millions of times, tiny molecules of soot. From the peak of Everest to glaciers at the bottom of the planet, an atmospheric rain of incinerated coal and petroleum particles blanketed the planet. These pollutants, carrying heavy metals such as lead, mercury, lead, cadmium, rode the air currents to saturate the Earth’s surface. By 2022, these heavy metals and tiny particles were killing 3.3 million people every year by entering their lungs, lodging in their organs, and causing strokes, asthma, heart attacks, organ failure, and early deaths. But a change began around 2010. Coal plants began to retire. Few new ones took their place. In 2018, the last US coal plant, a tiny boiler at the University of Alaska, was completed in Fairbanks. By 2020, renewables overtook coal and nuclear to become America’s second-largest source of electricity. In much of Europe, renewables displaced fossil fuels as the dominant electricity source, that same year.
Soon most countries were following the same trajectory. A massive expansion of energy storage balanced the grid. Among the most remarkable breakthroughs were artificial geothermal wells. Repurposed oil and gas fracking technology let engineers drill deep into the Earth’s crust, pump down water, and generate artificial reservoirs of superheated steam almost anywhere on the Earth. Roughly $173 trillion was spent fueling the clean energy transition through 2050. Yet the switch to clean energy ended up saving money (more than $26 trillion) along with millions of lives.
Putting the fun back in commuting
In 2022, people finally got a choice to buy an “electric car without compromises,” as Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk promised in 2006. Until that year, more than 97% of US car buyers still bought conventional vehicles. But things began to shift. More than 100 new EVs hit the market offering an average range of 250 miles (a number that doubled a few years later). As cost and range concerns began to fade, EV’s growth entered the “hockey stick” phase. It wasn’t just cars. Ford’s F-150 pickup, the most popular truck in America, went electric. The Ford Lightning soon became America’s most popular new model—right behind the Tesla Model Y. Prices dropped to parity with conventional vehicles a few years later (EV were already cheaper over their lifetime).
Electric vehicles ended up costing less because they only had about 20 moving parts (compared to 2,000 for internal combustion engines). No oil changes, no brake pads, no gas stations, no engine noise, no engine soot in cities and lungs. The 100,000-mile tune-up or trade-in? Some of the first generations of EVs lasted 250,000 miles—even 500,000 miles for some. Soon, most countries began to resemble Norway, where two out of every three new automobiles were already powered by batteries in 2021. Summer smog disappeared and the roaring “traffic noise” quieted, improving mental health for billions of people. Norway was no longer alone. Within a few decades, sales of all new petrol and diesel passenger cars were banned.
It wasn’t only four wheels. Bicycles experienced their biggest boom since the 1800s. A menagerie of one, two, and three-wheeled electric vehicles hit the streets. These diminutive EVs outsold cars and trucks, effectively shrinking the size of cities by bringing urban destinations closer without congestion. Software and artificial intelligence made the public transit experience faster and more accessible. Infrastructure bills, inspired by Ireland’s €165 billion plan drafted by a former bike shop owner in 2021, began funding bike lanes and sidewalks connected to public transit rather than roads for the first time.
Lights stay on while utility bills drop
Electrifying our homes, and energy grid, turned out to be a quiet revolution behind your light switch. Millions of batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, and heat pumps came online within a matter of years. While only four countries—Paraguay, Iceland, Sweden, and Uruguay—had achieved nearly 100% carbon-free electricity by 2022, a proliferation of strategies allowed more countries to approach their net-zero commitments in the following decades. Nuclear reactors let France rapidly cut energy sector emissions to nearly zero. The US doubled down on offshore wind, solar, and even engineered geothermal. China, the world’s largest coal consumer, surprised everyone in 2021. It embarked on the largest offshore wind construction project in history building 26 gigawatts (more than the rest of the world had built since 2015) in a single year, and then doubled that over the next decade.
Nearly every appliance at home became electric. New heat pumps introduced in the 2020s (imagine refrigerators capable of generating hot or cold air) could operate in extreme climates at a fraction of the cost of fossil fuels. Some new buildings even got home geothermal: tiny, inch-wide underground pipes sunk 10 feet below the surface to tap the constant subterranean temperatures of 55°Fahrenheit, winter or summer.
Homes became power plants. Even after falling 90% in the 2000s, solar cell prices kept dropping. Panels were no longer installed on your home. They became the homes: shingles, window glazing, and even siding arrived embedded with cheap photovoltaics generating a current. Sunny days ran a dryer, charged home batteries, and refueled the car. Any surplus went to neighbors on microgrids, essentially mini-utilities to generate and share electricity.
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Burgers got more delicious
Meat wasn’t something you wanted to know too much about during the era of feedlots. It was standard in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations for animals like cows and pigs to be standing in their own excrement, drugged to prevent infections, and shipped off to slaughterhouses. Beyond the enormous climate and water impacts, it was wildly inefficient to raise 80 billion animals each year for food.
Things began to change in the 2010s. A wave of plant-based meat and animal products hit the market. They did more than squish together vegetables into patties: they reverse-engineered meat itself. By replicating meat’s chemical composition, companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat found new ways to combine proteins (pea, soy, and other plants) with fats and flavors attracting a much broader swath of the 90% or so of the public who were not vegetarians.
What really changed the game, though, was the arrival of cultured meats that combined animal cells with vegetable proteins. Growing meat in the lab, it turned out, was too expensive on its own (quarter pounders with cheese might run $2,500). But adding lab-grown animal cells to vegetable protein led to bacon and burgers nearly indistinguishable (some said even better) than the original. By the first half of the 21st century, “meat” consumption continued to climb, especially in places like Africa, as poverty fell. But consumption of wild and feedlot meat fell dramatically as new generations flocked to new protein sources.
Of course, the jobs
People began to reevaluate their life and work after the pandemic. Workers demanded better conditions: $15 minimum wage laws passed across the US, the largest national wage hike in US history. Starbucks unionized. Amazon warehouses weren’t far behind. Squeezed by worker shortages, industries from hotels to restaurants to trucking overhauled their jobs to attract and retain workers. Silicon Valley went further: remote work and the four-day workweek soon became the norm, spreading the practice beyond the Bay Area as thousands of white-collar firms began vying for top talent.
Then green jobs took off. Tens of thousands of new jobs rose with the solar and wind sector. And as Katherine Boyle forecasted, satellite internet through SpaceX’s Starlink system enabled some to pursue careers close to family, rather than across the country. For families, it lightened the burden on working parents, resurrecting some rural and remote communities after a long and painful hollowing out.
Other “symbolic knowledge workers” dropped out completely. Professionals traded pixels for manual labor, embracing the trades as carpenters, plumbers, and electricians. One climate journalist who left his job to become a trainee electrician wrote that “slithering into crawlspaces has me happier than I've felt in years.”
It was an early transition to a different, slower, more circular economy. Societies began to value more flexibility again, from the workforce to manufacturing. Shorter hours brought nurses back from the brink of burnout. Advanced factories enticed high-quality manufacturing jobs from China. Many cities, regions, and countries emphasized more local self-sufficiency.
As our poll of Hothouse readers below shows, people wanted “a more community-centric and slower-paced way of life.” A net-zero world helped deliver it.
Your poll Results: What vision of the future motivates you the most? It's a choose-your-own-adventure storybook come to life 🧚🏻
16% … Not having to worry about gas drifting north of the price of a gallon of milk ever again! ⛽️ 🐮
21% … A safe and accessible natural world for my own children to grow up and enjoy. 🏞
58% … A more community-centric and slower-paced way of life. 🍵 🫖 🍰
5% … I am so ready for downed power lines to be a thing of the past. Bring on the local renewable energy grid. ☀️🔌
Thanks to reader Rohit Gawande for suggesting AOC’s climate action video in this issue.
Hothouse is a weekly climate action newsletter written and edited by Mike Coren and Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read.
What a fun read this was. A few more links for reference might have been useful, but the content and style were both excellent.